


conversations about the dead

by birdsofthesoul



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s14e14 Ouroboros, Family Dynamics, Gen, Miscommunication, Resentment, Season/Series 14, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 19:32:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18430631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdsofthesoul/pseuds/birdsofthesoul
Summary: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."— Leo Tolstoy, Anna KareninaOr: some thoughts to fill in the blanks.





	1. Sam

Dean doesn’t know about the catacombs.

Sam found them two weeks after they’d moved in, the bones of the men who had built the bunker, and when he took out the EMF meter, it was silent and its silence revealed more of the truth than he had wished to learn.

That very instant, he thought he would leave and never come back.

But upstairs.

Upstairs, Dean had just decorated his room, put on his favorite dead-guy robe, made a few burgers.

John Winchester didn’t raise his sons to be squeamish, and Sam Winchester was John’s son through and through.

He seals off the catacombs after the refugees move in. It’s the kind of place that might make them question why he’s given them a permanent home when it’s clear that they discomfit Dean, and the answer isn’t one he wants to dwell on. Sam will never match the Men of Letters for ruthlessness, but like his grandfather and his father before him, he doesn’t put much stock in the loyalty of others.

The paranoia.

It’s bred into him.

It’s what stays his tongue when he’s standing in the infirmary with Dean heavy in his arms. It’s not a decision he makes consciously, and later he will tell himself that this is a question for catastrophe theory, not ethics, but however he justifies it to himself, he will know this—

Dean is dying in his arms, head lolling onto Sam’s shoulder lifelessly, face pale and bloodstained and drawn because it’s been forty years of hell followed by another ten aboveground, and Sam has yet to make him happy.

That’s all Sam wants — his brother happy.

But in that moment, the possibility of Sam of making Dean anything other than dead is slipping rapidly through his fingers. Maggie and the other hunters are materializing into the room, Castiel has given up on healing Dean and has doubled down on his efforts to make sure that _Jack_ doesn’t do it either, and Sam—

Sam understands how the catacombs came to be.


	2. Mary

Mary found out about Samuel Campbell’s second death two weeks after she left her sons to hunt.

“Your whole family is dead,” Arlene told her over the phone.

“Yours too,” Mary said, and a burst of static exploded on the other end, hostile and bitter.

“I remarried, you hear me?” Arlene said, urgent and shrill. “I have a new family now. I don’t want anything to do with you Campbells, but y’all just keep coming out of the woodwork. God, it was bad enough when your dad came back. Samuel Campbell was a dictator, and I said good riddance when I heard that Sam Winchester put him down. It was a pity they couldn’t have taken each other out—”

There’s more. Mary’s sure Arlene said more, but she doesn’t remember more from that conversation. It comes to her in snatches, but what she really remembers is the slow horror of being reorphaned, forty-three years down the line, at the hands of her own son.

And then the inexorable creep of envy.

Inexplicably, she envies Arlene, whose husband and friends are all dead.

“You still there?” Arlene asked. “Listen, my daughter turns five in a few months. I don’t want you having anything to do with her. I put your family behind me and I’ll do anything to keep it that way.”

“Congratulations on your daughter,” Mary said at last, because there was nothing else left to say.

“Turns out Christian was the one shooting blanks,” Arlene said in her awful, abrasive way. “Story of my life, really.”

Arlene got to vent, weep, rend her hair, and then she went back to her new life.

The story of Arlene’s life gets better, because she gets a new beginning, but Mary?

Mary’s life is cyclical, as she’s come to realize.

It’s almost poetic, she thinks sometimes, that Sam is the one to kill her father. This town’s only big enough for one of them and the twenty-first century is the century of the Winchesters.

History repeats itself in funny ways. When she was nineteen years old, she was the youngest hunter in the household run by Samuel and Deanna Campbell and all she wanted was freedom. Forty-five years later, she’s still the youngest hunter in a household run by Sam and Dean.

Sam(uel) still doesn’t really speak to her. Dean(na) still looks at her with the saddest eyes.

And Mary?

She still hasn’t stopped running.


	3. Jack

The gorgon said that he could see their fates.

Jack can see it too — the piece of gold that’s keeping Dean’s soul tethered to this plane.

Dean’s thread has always been thin and fraying, and maybe on a different man it could have lasted a few more years, but in the end the soul is what makes or breaks the thread. And Dean’s soul is heavy.

In less than a year, Dean’s soul will break free from the threads that have him pulled in every direction.

As for Jack?

He has a fate too, spun from pure gold.

Very soon he will have nothing to weigh it down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of a soul being too heavy for fate to carry is shamelessly cribbed from Kennedy Xu (南派三叔, as he's more commonly known in China), who once described his seminal character 张起灵 with those exact words.


	4. Castiel

Castiel buys another truck. It’s a 1986 GMC Sierra, which is to say that it commands respect in the bunker, even if it guzzles gas at the speed of light.

“This is so much nicer than that sedan you had a while ago,” Dean says, running his hand along the grille. “You know, Dad drove a truck like this after he gave me the Impala.”

Castiel knows. By God he knows. It’s why he bought the truck in the first place.

Dean leaves room for three people in his life, and those spaces are labeled Sam, John, and Mary.

Castiel doesn’t think Dean realizes that he does this, that he squeezes every other person in his life into what little room is left. It’s not always hurtful, what he does, because it’s so subtle, but it also means that everyone else is a perpetual foreigner trying to assimilate into his world.

Jack hasn’t noticed how he doesn’t really fit. He might, when he’s older, but he won’t for many years yet because Sam’s made some room in his slot for Jack to move in.

Sam thinks he’s taken up John’s mantle.

Castiel knows better.

John and the role of John are separate entities in Dean’s mind, and as much as Dean reveres the former, his feelings on the latter are much more ambiguous, because John and Dean did not love each other very well, even if they loved each other very much.

It’s a dubious sort of honor, Castiel thinks, that he is the one who’s occupied that role, if intermittently, for the past ten years. Dean doesn’t mind it when Castiel steps into John’s shoes. He even demands it, and Castiel gladly plays along because it comforts Dean in an indefinable way.

It gives Castiel the leeway he needs.

But he wonders sometimes, what Cas and Dean would look like if it weren’t so easy for him to slide into the empty space John left behind. If he didn’t assume John’s habits so casually, the wanderlust, the unilateral decision making, the long absences.

Castiel is a reboot of a reboot of a reboot.

Lately, Castiel has been thinking about the future. The distant future, where Sam and Dean are gone, and he’s left alone in the world with Jack. He might have to retrace John’s footsteps, if Sam and Dean die violently. He’s probably going to follow John’s path, even if Sam and Dean die in their sleep.

What else is there to do?


	5. Dean

Dean knows about the catacombs.

He’s made his peace with living in a tomb.


End file.
